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[This is a long post. It also feels like a bit of a mess. Whoda thought that creating a popup menu when there are no resources available in a navigator could be so non-trivial?]

So what’s the problem (or as they say in marketing speak: what is the challenge)?

The challenge (or as they say in real life: the pain) is quite easy to describe: when I right click in the custom navigator the popup menu appears. When I create a custom project and right-click on it the popup menu does not appear.

That behavior has to stop or I am turning this blog around right now (I’m not kidding! I’ll turn around right now!).

Alright. I lied. We actually have two problems:

Remove the undefined menu items from the popup when nothing is available or selected

Enable a specific set of menus when a Custom Project has been created

What this means is we have to decide when menu items appear/disappear or are enabled/disabled based on items being selected/unselected.

Sounds like a lot of combinations. Sounds like a job for a UML State diagram which I actually like when I am writing a real application. The issue here is that I am still kinda just messing with this and the state diagram makes me become too serious (I find that even the squirrels start to complain).

So let’s list the menu items we know so far:

New Custom Project

New Schema File

New Stored Procedure File

Open Project

Close Project

Copy

Paste

Delete

Import

Export

Refresh

Properties

Looks like a lot. Let’s think about this: copy, paste and delete don’t mean what they usually do, except for projects. I expect them to only copy/paste/delete the nodes they represent not entire files. Let’s leave them for last so let’s just remove them.

Open and Close project sounds too cool to be true. They will come after we do copy, paste and delete (and while we’re at it, how about working sets? Nah.).

Import and Export are also unknown. Since importing/exporting anything but Custom Projects seems rather odd, and we don’t know what it means to import or export Custom Projects, they will have to go too.

That leaves us with:

New Custom Project

New Schema File

New Stored Procedure File

Refresh

Properties

Much more managable. Also, we can expand what it means to be a schema and stored procedure in the Custom Navigator: the schema’s child nodes have New behavior as does the Stored Procedure node. So the list really looks like this:

New Custom Project

New Schema Table

New Schema View

New Schema Filter

New Stored Procedure

Refresh

Properties

When nothing is selected the following are enabled:

New Custom Project

Refresh

We can’t go around randomly creating Tables, Views and Filters just because, now can we?

When a Custom Project, or any custom resource, is selected the following are enabled:

What the above means is that the easiest way to control the popup menu for this custom navigator is to make one (or in this case two) rather than rely on the default popup and reconfigure it as we go. I tried desperately to avoid it, but in order to remove the default presentation of New, Import and Export it is just plain ol’ easier to make a new popup menu. Dems the breaks.

Tasks for this post and the next:

Create a popup menu when the Custom navigator is empty

Create a popup menu when a resource is selected in the Custom navigator

How (are we doing it?)

Time to back track. Remove the following:

Remove all three commonWizard entries found under org.eclipse.ui.navigator.navigatorContent. That removes the menu entries under the popup menu New.

Open the Externalize Strings Wizard and move the two strings to messages.properties in the folder with the action provider code.

Why (did we do it that way?)

To do today’s tasks it is necessary to clean the deck. That means removing all the wonderous things that took advantage of all the default GUI hooks and basically putting them back with new hooks. Think of it like spring cleaning…without spring or the cleaning.

Since we have already decided to have only the menu entries we really need we have to remove the commonWizard and org.eclipse.ui.menus entries for now. Don’t worry, we’ll put them back. It will be easier and cleaner to add them in sequence rather than removing some pieces, moving things around and hoping they work eventually.

Remove all three commonWizard entries found under org.eclipse.ui.navigator.navigatorContent. That removes the menu entries under the popup menu New.

Remove navigatorplugin –> plugin.xml –> org.eclipse.ui.menus

As you should already know from the last post, the menuContribution entry found under org.eclipse.ui.menus let’s you directly add new menu items to an existing popup by giving Eclipse the path to the menu being affected. We’ll use this again later. Some things are too good to give up for long.

Remove org.eclipse.ui.navigator.viewer –> customnavigator.navigator (viewerActionBinding) entry.The value of actionExtension –> pattern refers to the ids of the actionProvider classes that execute the default behavior when a popup menu item is selected. For example, the value we just removed, org.eclipse.ui.navigator.resources.*, refers to the actionProvider ids found in the org.eclipse.ui.navigator.resources plug-in. Remember how the default popup menu displays New, Import, Export and Refresh? Well, if you open org.eclipse.ui.navigator.resources –> plugin.xml you will find an actionProvider entry for the following classes (there are others, but additional actionProvider do not concern me):

Notice that the above ids fit the pattern org.eclipse.ui.navigator.resources.*. Eclipse doesn’t care about the class name; it cares about the id. Yes, there are other actionProviders, but they have enablement criteria that keeps them from being displayed when nothing is selected.

Define the new popup menu and the insertionPoints.Time to make the donuts.

Let’s create the popup and add one menu item. In order to do that we have to

Create a viewer entry in org.eclipse.ui.viewer

Create a popupMenu entry under the viewer

Add an insertion point under the popupMenu

Create a viewerActionBinding and actionExtension entry in org.eclipse.ui.navigator.viewer

Create a viewerActionBinding and actionExtension entry in org.eclipse.ui.navigator.viewer

org.eclipse.ui.navigator.viewer –> New –> viewerActionBinding

viewerId: customnavigator.navigator

customnavigator.navigator (viewerActionBinding) –> New –> includes

includes –> New –> actionExtension

pattern: org.eclipse.ui.navigator.resources.NewActions

Quick note: The name group.new comes from ICommonMenuConstants found in org.eclipse.ui.navigator. Whenever possible I recommend adhering to existing naming conventions just to make things easier to find.

Just for yucks we are using an existing action provider: org.eclipse.ui.internal.navigator.resources.actions.NewActionProvider whose id is org.eclipse.ui.navigator.resources.NewActions. What is interesting about the NewActionProvider is that it creates a new menu insertion point in the popup which allows menu items to be added as submenus. What is bad about NewActionProvider is that it does it programmatically.

That’s right, we cannot declare an insertion point for submenus in plugin.xml; the insertion point for a submenu has to be declared programmatically. Yes, code will have to be written, but we are going to steal copy most of it anyway.

Start the runtime workbench and check that the popup menu appears when there is nothing displayed in the navigator. Exit the runtime workbench when you are done. Let’s create our own version of this code.

Implement a version of CustomNewActionProvider to create an insertion point for the New Wizards.

Start the runtime workbench and check that the New popup menu appears and that it has one submenu, Other, which both appears and is enabled when there is nothing displayed in the navigator. Exit the runtime workbench when you are done.

Add Custom Project to the New menu
Let’s put back one of the pieces we removed earlier:

org.eclipse.ui.navigator.navigatorContent –> New –> commonWizard

type: new

wizardId: customplugin.wizard.new.custom

Start the runtime workbench and check that the popup menu appears when there is nothing displayed in the navigator. Exit the runtime workbench when you are done.

Add the Refresh menu
Let’s add the Refresh menu without the functionality…just to maintain purity of thought. Besides, I confuse easily. We’ll add the code in a few steps.First, add a new insertionPoint for the Refresh menu:

Again, notice the use of the id, not the class name. Could I simple have one entry for all of these action providers by putting in a pattern of customnavigator.popup.actionprovider.*? Of course, but where’s the fun in that (in other words, use that kind of pattern once you understand why you are using it. Until then, create individual entries)?

Start the runtime workbench and check that the expected popup menus appears when there is nothing displayed in the navigator. Exit the runtime workbench.

For those of you wondering when we added support for F5: the key binding is added by RefreshAction.

Add Refresh icons
method makeActions() is looking for an enabled and a disabled image for Refresh. Add the following images to your customnavigator icon folder:

Start the runtime workbench and check that the expected popup menus appears when there is nothing displayed in the navigator. Exit the runtime workbench.

What Just Happened?

So we took a few steps back and a few steps forward.

We removed the plugin.xml entries that reconfigured the default popup.

We created a new popup menu definition with insertion points.

We declared and implemented two action providers: New and Refresh.

We declared two action extensions that referred to the action providers.

We declared a commonWizard entry to add the New Custom Project Wizard to the New popup menu.

Not bad for a post that I just couldn’t find the time for. For some reason it felt like a lot to do to create a new default menu. Adding the other items will be much simpler. I hope.

In other news: some of you may have noticed that in past posts I occasionally mentioned Deployment files as a feature. I am easily confused. The only things we are going to do are Custom Projects, Schemas and Stored Procedures. Any references to anything else are red herrings, blind alleys, and otherwise dead ends. Avoid them unless you are intent on finding a place to sleep.

During the writing of Part 19, Adding Behavior to the menu items, I discovered something both heartening and disturbing: the addition of behavior to the New Wizards is much easier than I thought. Where I used the org.eclipse.ui.menus extension point to add the menu items to the New menu of the default popup menu I could have used the org.eclipse.ui.navigator.navigatorContent –> commonWizard extension instead. This would take care of both presentation and behavior.

Since using the org.eclipse.ui.menus to accomplish this task is wrong (yes, wrong*) I thought I would correct this obvious affront to civilization and pleasant company before the wrong kind of meme invades too many impressionable minds and causes an aggregation of incorrect behavior leading to that worst of all possible behaviors: rudeness.

Consider this a refactoring of Part 18 as the things discovered in it are still valid and will help in the controlling of the popup menu in other contexts…just not this one.

Okay! Places everyone! This time with feeling!

[Pretend that you just finished reading the brilliant advice that was Part 17 and are looking for the enlightenment that only comes from believing in God, unicorns or the Na’vi.]

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: adding commands to the popup menu.

What menus do we need to put in? Just a few. The Custom Navigator popup menu should contain:

New – Sub-menu with choices (Custom Project, Schema, and Deployment. Eventually we will change Schema to Tables, Views, Filters)

Copy – Ctrl+C (an item in a category or an entire category)

Paste – Ctrl+V (an item in a category or an entire category)

Remove – Del or Ctrl+X (an item in a category or an entire category)

We will not worry about Import/Export behavior as that will be added to the Import/Export Wizard with the associated additions to the main menu, toolbar, etc. done as appropriate (meaning later, when I care).

The thing to remember is: presentation first, behavior second. Actually, by the time we’re done we will have done both for the price of one (well, at least for the New wizards).

Where should the popup menu configuration/code go: into the customplugin or customnavigator project? Because we are directly affecting the navigator popup menu the configuration will go into the customnavigator plug-in. I promise not to regret it later when someone points out why it would really be in the customplugin project.

The above is a lot to do all at once so feel free to add one section at a time and check the runtime workbench. Once you add the org.eclipse.ui.menus extension along with the menuContribution and one of the commands you should be able to open the Custom Perspective, right click in the Custom Navigator and see a lovely popup menu.

The final result is beautifully displayed in the screen capture (don’t sweat the fact that Copy is not disabled. That is under the control of Eclipse and the clipboard. You will probably have a different item enabled or none).

But first: time to reveal the magic.

Why (did we do it that way?)

If you want to add a menu item to the popup menu the easiest way is to use the org.eclipse.ui.menus extension and add a menuContribution to it (hmm. That would imply there is another way to do this. Yes, using actionSets…which have been deprecated, so don’t). The menuContribution‘s locationURI is the path to the location within the popup where your new menu item should go. If we were adding our menu item at the top level popup we would simply have used a locationURI of popup:customplugin.customnavigator?after=additions; that’s right: simply using the id of the navigator places the menu item into its popup. Using the after=additions piece puts the menu items directly in the popup right after the last item…which is not where we want it.

So the $54,000 question is: what locationURI do we use to put our menu items in the correct spot?

That turns out to be the wrong question (I am starting to dislike that word).

The real question is: if there is a shortcut to adding New Wizards to the main menu, why isn’t there a way to do that with the navigator popup menu? If you recall from Part 15 we added our 3 New Wizards to the main menu by using the org.eclipse.ui.perspectiveExtensions –> perspectiveExtension –> newWizardShortcut. By simply supplying the New Wizard id Eclipse took care of adding it to the main menu File –> New and to the toolbar New button.

The real answer is: there is a way to do it and it involves the org.eclipse.ui.navigator.navigatorContent extension point. It has a child extension named commonWizards that does the equivalent behavior of the newWizardShortcut but for popup menus. On one hand, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread since we don’t have to configure as much (and did I mention no code?), but on the other hand we still have no idea how to add to a popup menu submenu such as New when the behavior we want to add has nothing to do with a wizard.

Let’s speak to that later. [Peek at the end of the post after the configuration files; I speak to the madness needed to implement the method of adding to the default popup menu supplied with the Common Navigator Framework.]

The configuration of the remaining menus now make sense. Add a new menuContribution to the org.eclipse.ui.menus extension and, using the high-level custom navigator path location URI (popup:customnavigator.navigator?before=import), we tell Eclipse to put the menus before the import section. Again, just to supply the required information we assign the internal copy, paste, and delete commandIds to the various menus.

The next big question: why did we do it that way? Or more accurately: where is the documentation for this magic?

Part of the answer is easy: instructions on adding to a popup menu can be found here. Part of the answer is weak: I stumbled on the help documentation for commonWizard while I was looking up something else.

Time to wash up:

Go to the Overview tab, click on Externalize Strings Wizard and externalize the strings

In plugin.xml click on the MANIFEST.MF tab, click on the light bulb in the left hand margin and select Add Missing Packages

(I hope this was a better answer to your question, Augusto. It’s always better the second time…)

* I know, I know: it still works. So what? you may say. So what?! So everything. If I had known about the commonWizard extension sooner I would have used it first as it would have eliminated the need for the Plug-in Spy and the search from the Common Navigator popup menu path to the New menu. While it is still just configuration, it is needless configuration. Needless. Need less. Compare what commonWizard needs:

to what org.eclipse.ui.menus –> menuContribution is looking for:

Use the more extensive extension when extensiveness is called for. Otherwise, strive to be simple. Like a new born baby. Or the brain of a politician.

Extra Credit

So you want to add non-Wizard behavior to the default popup menu and aren’t sure how? You’ve come to the right place. Let’s look at what it means to add a new menu item to the New menu item of the default popup menu of our Custom Navigator.

But before I can answer that we have to fix something. Well, some of us have to fix something.

For those of you doing this on Windows: shield your eyes and move on to the section titled CONTINUE HERE (while goto may be considered harmful, continue here isn’t).

Now that we have all of those miscreants out of the way: those of you who need to see the answer with your own eyes, but are using Kubuntu, need to change the Eclipse key binding for the runtime workbench from Shift+Alt+F2 to Shift+Alt+F3. Why? Because in order to discover the correct path to the New menu in the popup we need the Plug-in Spy to work. The Plug-in Spy, at least on Kubuntu, does not work properly because Shift+Alt+F2 doesn’t work properly; changing the key binding from Shift+Alt+F2 to Shift+Alt+F3 works.

How do we change the key binding? Start and do the following from the runtime workbench:

Window –> Preferences –> General –> Keys

In the text field below the Scheme drop down type: shift+alt+f

Press Delete in the Binding field to remove the current key binding

With the cursor in the Binding field press the shift key, the alt key and the F3 key all at the same time.

Click OK to close the Preferences window

Now the bad news: you will have to do this every time you start the runtime workbench if you want to use the Plug-in Spy unless you unset the Launch configuration to clear the workspace; by not clearing the workspace you may find weird behavior that isn’t weird but appears to be weird because the runtime workbench is not cleaning up after itself. I recommend leaving the Launch configuration alone…meaning with the Clear selection checked.

The good news: you don’t need to use the Plug-in spy that often so this manual step is something you will not do too often. Grow up or start taking stronger meds.

CONTINUE HERE

Those of you on Windows: every time I say press Shift+Alt+F3 you must press Shift+Alt+F2. Got it? Shift+Alt+F3 really mean Shift+Alt+F2 (just in Windows). Think you can handle that?

Start the runtime workbench and open the Custom Perspective

Press Shift+Alt+F3. Notice the cursor changes appearance

Right click in the Custom Navigator and select New –> Project

Oh look! A window with wonderful information!

And there it is: the path used by the active contribution location URI: common.new.menu. If you change the current path for the Copy/Paste/Delete command from popup:customplugin.customnavigator?after=additions to popup:common.new.menu?after=additions and start the runtime workbench again you will find that the menus are part of the submenus associated with New.

So where can you find all this great information on inserting a menu item in the popup menu’s New menu?

My answer is going to be very unsatisfying: I don’t know. I went through a number of plug-ins, web sites and help files and found nothing. When I remembered the Plug-in Spy, and fixed the Shift+Alt+F2 problem (Kubuntu, remember?), I was able to discover the path I was looking for.